‘All the Old Knives’ by Olen Steinhauer

It turns out it could. Here we have the riveting tale of Henry Pelham and Celia Harrison, former lovers and colleagues in the Vienna CIA station during the middle of the last decade. While their tale doesn’t entirely unfold at a restaurant table, it does mostly — and succeeds beautifully against the challenge Steinhauer set for himself.

Henry is still working as an agent, albeit at a desk rather than in the field; Celia has left the service, married an older man, and borne two children. Henry’s task is to reexamine the Flughafen Wien fiasco. That terrorist attack on a plane on the ground in Vienna, which occurred on Henry and Celia’s watch, resulted in more than 100 dead hostages, including Americans. Henry must determine whether an agent in the Vienna station had been flipped by the terrorists. It appears so; if it was, it caused the death of a courier inside the plane who was communicating with the local agents. Could the traitor, if he or she existed, have been Bill Compton, a senior agent and father figure to Celia? Or was Celia herself the traitor? Henry must travel to her new home, Carmel-by-the-Sea, and discuss the matter with her.

And with all those balls in the air. . .

Steinhauer earns high marks for laying this all out in utilitarian but graceful prose. This is most necessary because of the structure of the book, which alternates between the two main characters’ retrospection, intermixed with objective-document chapters that relate to them. The time shifts, thankfully, are never used in ways that become head-scratchers, as they do with some writers.

And here and there among the tiny jigsaw puzzle pieces that fit together so neatly, Steinhauer manages sharp-eyed observations, such as Henry’s about Carmel:

[T]he town center looks like a cinematic version of a quaint English village. Not a real English village, mind, but the kind in which Miss Marple might find herself stumbling around, discovering corpses among the antiques.

Early menace

Over all of this hangs a sense of menace that is established early on a single page: Henry has a cryptic phone conversation that is not so opaque that it obscures the fact that he has arranged to kill his former lover if necessary.

It is not an overstatement to suggest that All the Old Knives might well be the best new book you’ll read in a couple of years, particularly if you’re partial to espionage fiction. Graham Greene would likely call it an “entertainment,” but like Greene’s best entertainments, it is definitely more. What is somewhat astonishing is that Steinhauer claims to have finished the book in a month. We mere mortals can only hope that didn’t include revisions and tweaks.